[IPython-dev] Moving forward with GUI's (was Re: Help! TR: TR: Ipython plugin

[Fernando Perez]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Ville M. Vainio <vivainio at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 11:39 PM, Laurent Dufrechou
> <laurent.dufrechou at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> About specific API for GUI devs,
>> Here is my feeling about what was missing in ipython0 and that could be
>> refactored/improved while switching to ipython1:
>
> Since I have some professional interest to boost my qt skills, I
> thought that providing qscintilla (and pyqt4) version of ipython might
> be a good way to really find out what needs to be generalized in
> IPython. Of course you have already done a good job with wxipython,
> but it would really help overall ipython architecture if we made the
> code in GUI's as natural as possible (i.e. without needing the hacks
> you had to do for wxipython). At least eric4 could then embed ipython
> instead of vanilla python.
>
> As assumedly Fernando now re-assumes the coordinator role for the
> stable branch, plus the influx of other dev's to ipython0 code base,
> it should be much easier for me personally to allocate the "ipython
> time" into playing with a largish feature like this.

That is an excellent plan.  Let's make sure that as we work on this,
we keep in mind:

- the work that Barry has been doing on Cocoa

- correct integration with twisted's event loop.  There's a lot of
interest in the -twisted option working right, and twisted has GUI
integration mechanisms (as discussed here earlier); we just want the
whole thing to play nice with the networking layer used for
distributed use.  Note that the distributed use is not just for
parallel computing: you may also want a Qt/Wx gui working on a remote
ipython instance...

- the needs for the same abstractions to work over the network from
frontends like a web browser that uses JavaScript.

Cheers,

f